Reflections on the contemporary church, culture, Christian philosophy and doctrine.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Global Warming and a Planetary One-Child Policy

Much has been made of this piece of journalistic tripe over the last couple of days, so I thought I would go ahead and read it. Mercifully, it is short. The basic claim is the same uber-radical claim made by progressives over the past several decades – the real problem with humans is humans. There are just too many of us, and we are slowing killing the planet and each other (and those are ranked in the right ontological order for them). In her frighteningly titled “The real inconvenient truth,” Diane Francis reports:

The "inconvenient truth" overhanging the UN's Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China's one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.

Whether Francis knows exactly what that entails, you ought to know. China’s one-child policy is in practice a recipe for three things: millions of state-sponsored and enforced abortions, a severely declining female birth rate, and hundreds of thousands of abandoned malformed and disabled children. In other words, a state-enforced one-child policy means in actuality that girls and “unwanted” children are aborted and abandoned at unusual rates. But, it seems, none of this is a problem for Francis. And as is typical, we humans need to take a cue from our intelligent plant and animal ancestors.

The world's other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity's soaring reproduction rate…. Humans are the only rational animals but have yet to prove it.

On one level the only appropriate response to this is a good chuckle and casual dismissal. On another level, Francis is allegedly one of “the only rational animals” but apparently needs a quick lesson in reason. Francis is wrong on every assumption – she assumes the entire planet’s human population is growing at an unsustainable rate, she assumes China’s policy is environmentally driven and successful, she assumes it is a good thing to have this kind of “planetary law,” and she assumes the moral high-ground belongs to population control advocates.

It is flatly false that the planet’s population is growing out of control. The smart (and outside the inner circle of politically correct scientific coercion) view is that most of the world is in a demographic winter. Only certain segments of the world’s population are growing. Most of them are deeply religious groups and countries in the developing world. So, as argued before, population control like this on a planetary level is de facto eugenics.

China doesn’t care one whit about the environment. They force families to have only one child because their command and control economy can’t keep up. It’s an old story, really. When Stalin’s Five Year Plans couldn’t feed his entire population, he decided the best thing to do was stick with the Plan and slaughter tens of millions of peasants. Francis might be on-board.

Without going too long, it is simply not true that the population control advocates have the moral high-ground. First of all, the radical predictions over the last 50 years have failed to come true. Obama currently has a Science Czar who predicted in the 60s and 70s that the East Coast would be unlivable and the Mid-West would be an arid dust bowl – all by 1985. And we still listen to these people? Secondly, the plans advocated by population control advocates are, pure and simple, an effort to eliminate “other people.” Eugenics is eugenics is eugenics.